The Frostwoven Crown (Book 4)

by Andrew Hunter

  Suddenly the rooftop of the dome-shaped building at the center of the temple complex exploded upward in fragments as a great shaft of green flame shot up from below.

  Garrett staggered backwards, unable to believe what he was seeing. A vast column of glistening black flesh, mingled with witchfire, writhed like the body of some titanic worm. From its head, a myriad of fiery tentacles looped out and coiled around the wings of the dragon.

  Kadreaan roared in terror and Graelle screamed as the avatar of Mauravant herself dragged them down into the pit below.

  "Fesche!" Bargas wheezed, and Garrett gasped for breath, trying to wrap his mind around what he had just witnessed.

  Garrett rushed to the balcony's edge, leaning as far out as he could to gaze, wide-eyed at the shattered black hole in the domed roof and the flickering green light that shone from within.

  "What... what just happened?" Garrett cried.

  Bargas shook his head in disbelief, unable to tear his gaze away from the temple.

  Then a burst of green flame erupted from the hole, and a black wing claw emerged to dig into the crumbling shell of the rooftop. An anguished roar echoed through the city as Kadreaan dragged himself back into the light.

  The dragon pulled himself out again, his body dripping with black worms. Garrett could see glimpses of red armor as Graelle fought to tear the crawling things from his body. Clouds of steam arose where Kadreaan was able to cough out a breath and sear away the hungry worms that struggled to devour dragon and rider alike. Slowly the dragon tore himself free and was able to get his claws on the remains of the rooftop. With a mighty surge, he launched himself upward again.

  "Gaze into the face of Death itself!" the High Priestess screamed, and once again green flame surged up from the pit to engulf the Chadiri dragon and its rider.

  "Kadreaan!" Graelle shouted, "Purge this world of her evil!"

  The dragon twisted his head to the side and opened his jaws wide, even as the great ghostly worm once again dragged his body toward the pit. A shimmering breath of searing heat whooshed out to blast the walls of the temple and the balcony on which the High Priestess stood.

  The screams of the High Priestess split the night, projected throughout the city by whatever magic she had used to amplify her voice.

  Garrett sobbed in horror as he watched the distant figure of the woman stagger back into the shadows of the temple, her robes ablaze.

  The worms of Mauravant, now unguided by the priestess's will, dripped from the dragon's beating wings like gobbets of blood. Kadreaan shook his body clean, sending worms flying through the air with a whip of his tail. They fell and splattered against the stones of the temple like black raindrops.

  Graelle let out a triumphant laugh as Kadreaan lighted on the upper spires of the temple and began smashing them to ruin.

  "I think it's our turn now, boy," Bargas sighed.

  Garrett nodded grimly and motioned for the ghoul to follow him as he ran back through the tower behind him to a place overlooking the gardens.

  Garrett stared down into the shadow of the trees below until he made out the coppery glow of the fairy Shortgrass. Garrett waved his staff to get the fairy's attention, and Shortgrass sped away toward the temple. Garrett smiled to see the lights of a hundred more fairies rising from the trees to follow him.

  Garrett started jogging along the wall toward the western end of the garden, pausing often to look back over his shoulder. He could still see the dragon and hear his roars as he tore apart the Temple of Mauravant. He shuddered to think of the priestesses and Templars still inside. At least Serepheni wasn't there. The thought came to mind that she was no more safe where he had put her than she would have been, huddled in the ruins of the temple... far less safe, in fact.

  He pushed this thought out of his mind and ran on, his eyes going toward the two towers across the garden to the north. Several of his dearest friends were huddled in those towers, waiting their turns to play dragon bait... They trusted him with their lives. What was he doing?

  Kadreaan's roars sounded suddenly more confused than angry, and Garrett turned to look back toward the temple. The dragon shook his head in annoyance as a glittering cloud of fairies hovered around his head. The dragon snapped his jaws and snorted. Garrett sucked in a worried breath and kept moving toward the west, trusting his fairy army to play their part in the plan without getting themselves killed.

  Suddenly, the dragon let out a great bellow of frustration, and Graelle shouted, "Kadreaan!"

  Garrett glanced back to see the dragon lift skyward again, still snapping at the pesky fairies as they retreated back toward the garden. This is it, he thought.

  As the dragon cleared the garden wall, the first bolt of faefire from the northeast tower struck him in the right wing. Kadreaan shook his head in bewilderment as the fairies suddenly dropped away, disappearing into the canopy of trees below.

  "Pull him in," Garrett hissed as he continued to run along the wall, "Just pull him in and run."

  Kadreaan flapped his wings, shrugging off the rainbow flames as he flew over to investigate the wild barrage of magic pouring out of the northeast tower.

  "Good! Now run for it!" Garrett shouted, even though he knew his friends in the tower couldn't hear him.

  The bursts of rainbow-colored flames died out as Warren and Crane abandoned their post and retreated into the tower below. Garrett cast worried glances toward the tower as he ran, watching the dragon close in on it. He hoped his friends were moving fast enough to escape the dragon's wrath.

  Kadreaan flew past the tower, smashing the upper floor to pieces with his spiked tail.

  Garrett heard Bargas give a worried growl.

  Then an arc of magic flame leapt from the northern tower, so bright that it lit up the garden like daylight. It poured over the dragon's body like liquid fire, and Kadreaan's roar of pain mingled with Graelle's shout of surprise.

  The dragon fell backwards, losing altitude as the flame seemed to catch at the torn edges of his left wing, burning the thin membrane away like char cloth. Kadreaan rolled, trying to smother the flames with his other wing as he smashed against the side of the northeast tower, leaving a dragon-sized dent in the masonry. He caught himself, clinging to the side of the tower like a bat and howling in misery from the steaming hole in his wing.

  Another arc of magic flame shot from the northern tower to splash across the stones above the dragon's head. Kadreaan turned his blazing eyes toward the tower top and hissed in rage.

  "Mujah!" Garrett moaned, imagining the bright eyed prodigy playing Magi atop the tower, "Scupp, get him outta there now!"

  Another jet of faefire shot from the roof of the tower as Kadreaan launched skyward again, hungry for vengeance. The great black dragon sailed toward the northern tower, swaying like a sparrow in a storm and trailing cinders from his damaged wing.

  "Get out of there now!" Garrett screamed as the dragon hurtled towards his friends. They could not hear him this far away.

  A wild thought suddenly occurred to Garrett, and he fumbled in his shoulder bag, reaching for his flask of essence. It slipped out of his hand as he pulled it free of the bag and he scrambled after it as it rolled away down the parapet walkway. He dove and caught it an instant before it disappeared through a drainage spout in the side of the wall, and then looked up just in time to see Kadreaan smash into the northern tower, nearly tearing it from its foundation with the impact.

  "No," he gasped.

  *******

  The Girl in Brown had seen the sickly spurts of fairy magic coming from the first tower. They hadn't even slowed the dragon down. Garrett was a better magician than that, she mused with a strange touch of pride. He wasn't in that tower... Where then?

  When the arc of flame burst from the second tower, she knew that a true master of the arcane would be found at its source. She ignored the cries of the dragon above and leapt from branch to branch as she bounded through the treetops toward the second tower.

  Her heart l
eapt with fear when she saw the tower collapsing beneath the dragon's attack. Enormous chunks of stone rained down, thudding into the soft earth of the garden below as she dodged between them, desperate to reach the base of the tower.

  A falling boulder tore open a breach in the side of the tower in front of her, and she dove through, rolling to a stop inside. Dust and pebbles showered down around her, and she heard a woman scream somewhere above.

  The Girl in Brown scrambled up the stairs on all fours as the tower trembled and collapsed around her. Three levels up, she found the source of the scream.

  A female ghoul lay in the rubble of the staircase, bracing her arms against the section of wall that had fallen atop her, crushing her legs. A young human boy in a floppy blue hat was trying to push it off of her.

  "Run, Mujah!" the ghoul yelled, "I can't hold it! You gotta run!"

  "No, Scupp!" the boy shouted, "I'm not gonna leave you!"

  The ghoul's arms trembled as the weight of the wall pushed down on her. She sobbed in pain as the stones and timbers ground her legs between them.

  "I'm not leavin' you!" the boy cried, "You never leave anybody behind... you don't ever leave anybody behind!"

  "Get outta the way!" the Girl in Brown cried, pushing the boy aside to throw her shoulder against the wall.

  The boy looked up at her in amazement with tears streaming down his face.

  The ghoul screamed in agony as the Girl in Brown shoved hard, lifting the crumbling section of wall off of her legs. Dark blood suddenly spread across the brindle fur of the girl's broken legs, and she slumped into unconsciousness almost immediately.

  "Get her out!" the Girl in Brown shouted, and the boy seized the ghoul by the shoulders and pulled.

  "I can't!" he cried, twisting her shoulders to roll the ghoul over onto her side as he struggled to free her mangled left leg from the rubble.

  The Girl in Brown huffed in frustration and then wedged her shoulder lower against the wall as she reached down with her left hand and grabbed the senseless ghoul by the base of her tail.

  With a grunt of exertion, the Girl in Brown yanked hard, dragging the ghoul free of the debris... most of her anyway. The ghoul screamed once and then lost consciousness again as they pulled her free of the collapsing wall.

  As the dust of the collapse cleared, the Girl in Brown was able to fish out a roll of bandages, and she worked frantically to stop the flow of blood pulsing from a wound in the ghoul's furry thigh.

  The dragon roared again, and the dull thunder of collapsing stones rumbled all around them.

  "Where's Garrett?" the Girl in Brown demanded.

  "The south wall!" the boy in the blue hat cried, "We were just supposed to get the dragon's attention, but I messed up... it's all my fault!"

  The Girl in Brown muttered a curse. These two were just another distraction.

  "I'm sorry!" the boy wept, "I'm sorry!"

  "Hey!" the Girl in Brown shouted, "You want your friend to live, right?'

  He nodded back at her.

  "Then push down on her leg like this," the Girl in Brown said, "and don't let go 'till help comes."

  The boy put his hand on the ghoul's leg where she showed him and leaned across, putting his weight on the bloody wad of bandages.

  "Hold it there 'till help comes!" she said, making her words a command that he would not forget, "I have to go find Garrett."

  Then she heard Garrett's voice, booming through the walls of the ruined tower and loud enough to be heard all across Queensgarden.

  "Graelle!" Garrett's voice shouted, "I'm the one who got your army killed in the swamp! I'm the one who stole your plans and got you in trouble! If you wanna fight somebody, come fight me!"

  "Perhaps not the most eloquent challenge I've ever heard," the Girl in Brown sighed.

  The dragon above roared in rage. When it roared again a moment later, the sound was farther away.

  "Whatever works, I guess," the Girl in Brown said, getting to her feet.

  "Thanks," the boy in the floppy hat said, but the Girl in Brown was already headed out. If she didn't hurry, the dragon was going to kill Garrett before she had a chance to.

  *******

  "I think he heard you," Bargas said, watching the dragon lift off and fly unsteadily toward them across the garden.

  "Oh, crix," Garrett whispered as he lowered his hand from his throat and shoved the canister back inside his shoulder bag. It had been a while since he had seen the dragon from this angle. Running seemed like a pretty good idea now.

  Garrett sprinted toward the junction of the wall and the southwestern tower, hoping to reach it before the dragon reached him. He hadn't counted on how fast a dragon could fly.

  Garrett's feet went out from under him as Kadreaan slammed into the wall just behind him. He came down hard on his knees and hands, and Uncle's staff clattered out of his grip as he grunted in pain. He rolled quickly to retrieve the staff, his torn robe clinging to the bloody patch on his right knee.

  Kadreaan let out a deafening roar as his right foreclaw tore away the parapet wall between Garrett and the garden below. Garrett looked to see Bargas leap clear a moment before the dragon's left claw destroyed a twelve foot wide section of the battlement where he had just been standing. The big ghoul clawed his way up to safety on the far side as the stones crumbled away behind him.

  Garrett shoved himself to his feet as the dragon's head swung toward him with a rattling hiss.

  Kadreaan's jaws opened to reveal the mouth of hell within.

  "No!" Garrett screamed, shutting his eyes as, for the second time in his life, Kadreaan's searing breath washed over him.

  There was no pain this time, only a warm sensation like settling into a hot bath. So this is what it's like to die, he wondered.

  The voice in the back of his mind gave a bitter laugh, and then Garrett opened his eyes to see himself surrounded by roiling blue flames.

  "Not tonight wyrm!" a voice that sounded a little like Garrett's roared from Garrett's throat, "I don't feeling like dying again tonight!"

  Garrett stood to his full height, enjoying the look in Graelle's eyes as he stared in wonder at the young necromancer wreathed in icy blue flames. The flames flickered and faded away as Garrett faced him with a look of grim defiance.

  "How?" Graelle cried.

  Kadreaan only blinked and then turned his head to try to bite Garrett in half.

  Garrett leapt backward, raising Uncle Tinjin's staff defensively in front of him. The dragon's hot jaws closed upon the enchanted iron, biting with tremendous force, but still unable to bend the staff. Garrett struggled as the dragon gnawed at the iron staff and then suddenly twisted his head to the side, tearing it from Garrett's grip.

  Garrett was thrown, sliding over the edge of the broken parapet as he frantically scratched for a handhold among the charred, brittle tiles of the walkway. He caught himself with one hand as he went over the edge and quickly bettered his grip, gasping in panic as he kicked his heels against the crumbling wall below. He looked down to see the shadowy forest far beneath him and then up at the dragon hanging on the wall beside him.

  Kadreaan lifted his head high, Tinjin's staff still pinning his jaws open wide. He suddenly rattled out a fiery breath, and the iron staff burned cherry red. Garrett let out a weary sob as he watched the skull-headed staff fold and snap with a mournful ringing sound. He tried to pull himself up, but a stone gave way beneath his foot, and he slipped back down again, his bodyweight suspended by an uncertain grip on a few broken tiles.

  "You cost me dearly, boy," Graelle shouted, "You'll never know how much you cost me!"

  Kadreaan shook the fragments of Tinjin's staff from his teeth and gave a rattling growl as he lowered his head to Garrett's level again.

  "Well, I don't like you either!" Garrett shouted, yelping as a tile gave way, and he was once again hanging by a one-handed grip.

  Kadreaan opened his jaws again, tilting his head to deliver another bite, but a huge chunk of rock sudde
nly struck him in the teeth.

  "Over here you mountain o' meat!" Bargas roared, hefting another chunk of wall and hurling it to strike the dragon in the head again.

  "Bargas run!" Garrett shouted. He managed to grab another handful of tile and struggled to pull himself up before it slipped again.

  "I'm too old to run!" Bargas growled as he tore another section of wall free and lifted it above his head.

  "Kill him!" Graelle cried, pointing toward the shaggy gray ghoul.

  A shadowy blur appeared then over the top of the wall. Garrett caught only a glimpse of dark cloth fluttering in the air as something that moved too fast to see leapt onto the dragon's back.

  Graelle screamed as Klavicus ripped the horned helmet from his head and then raked out his left eye with a clawlike swipe.

  The Chadirian was able to bring his gauntleted fist up just in time to shove between the vampire's teeth and his throat, and the dragon launched out from the wall again, bucking and rolling beneath the two men.

  "Kadreaan!" the dragon rider yelled, flattening his body against the dragon's back as the vampire tore bloody gouges in his red armor.

  Bargas took advantage of the distraction and made the leap across to haul Garrett up by the scruff and throw the boy across his back. Garrett cried out in dismay as Bargas loped away, leaving the dragon lord and the vampire doorman locked in combat behind.

  Garrett watched as Klavicus yanked his head back, tearing off Graelle's gauntlet and breaking the man's arm in the process. He let the glove drop from his yellow fangs and stared down at his prey with grinning bloodlust.

  Then Kadreaan's spiked tail whipped around and smashed into the vampire's side, hurling his broken body far out over the dark garden below.

  Garrett screamed in despair as Kadreaan swung his great head around toward the falling vampire. There was a sound like pebbles rattling down a clay drainpipe, and then Garrett's friend disappeared in a flash of white-hot flame.

  *******

  The Girl in Brown looked up from the tree in which she paused to catch her breath. She saw the big ghoul running with Garrett on his back. The dragon was beating its wings, trying to gain altitude again despite its injured wing. If the boy had been carrying the flower, he would have tried to use it. Why was Garrett out in the open? What kind of stupid plan was this?